Excerpt from Eradication by Jonathan Miles, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Adi flushed and turned away, pretending to study something on the horizon.

It is a great romance, the captain went on. Like Romeo and Juliet, I think. But different. Isn't that right, Bruno?

The mate, drooling into the sea, hoisted a middle finger.

At this the captain laughed, but gently now, almost affectionately, as though some sort of abiding private ritual had been concluded, a routine punishment meted. He suckled his thin cigar and hummed some more before turning back to Adi.

And what about you? Is there a Mrs. Killer?

Adi lowered his eyes.

Ah, well. The captain shrugged. This is good. Otherwise you'd be sad to be leaving her today. You'd be annoying us with all your boohooing.

The risen sun was burning off the last of the fleecy clouds and all the world was blue and getting bluer. The captain's forecast for choppy seas had proven accurate, and the boat's hull kept smacking the water instead of gliding through it. To keep from getting bounced overboard Adi stood gripping the pilothouse roof and pinning his foot soles to the deck, bending at the knees with each spumy slap, his jaw clenched to keep his teeth from knocking.

Then he saw the captain motioning, corkscrewing a finger toward the stern.

Three porpoises were chasing the boat, diving in and out of the frothy wake. They were sleek and silver and to Adi seemed magical as mermaids. Soon a fourth porpoise appeared, larger and higher-flying than the others, and for a jittery moment, as it came swiveling through the spindrift, Adi feared it might leap onto the deck. When it didn't Adi whistled and wagged his head as though astonished by an athletic feat, by a gymnast sticking some implausible landing.

But as the porpoises kept tailing the boat a hazier anxiety began unsettling him. Why were the porpoises doing this? Their expressions—glimpsed briefly through the spray—were impenetrable to him. Were they stalking the boat like wolves, to attack it? Or like carrier pigeons, to warn of something? Or were they mobbing it, like gulls, to drive it away?

He looked to the captain, who must've sensed his bewilderment. They're playing. Like street dogs chasing cars.

Adi nodded and resumed watching until the captain barked to the mate: Hide his gun, Bruno! Mister Killer wants to shoot them!

Adi spun toward the captain, whose rubbery grin was overspreading his face and whose eyebrows were jumping and dancing with a caustic strain of delight.

That's not true, Adi protested. Don't say that.

With his thumb and forefinger the captain mimed a pistol shot toward the stern. Ka-blam. Then, with a crooked smile, he fanned his hands in a cavalier shrug.

Killers kill, he said.

The wounded glare Adi leveled at him seemed to take the captain by surprise. With popped eyes and an emphatic chop he motioned to himself and the helm. Like sailors sail!

He squirmed and sputtered, until:

And like mates, hooking a thumb toward Bruno, ... mate.

The blast of laughter that followed was as though two bombs detonated on the boat, one big, the other small. The captain yowled and stomped and with tears in his eyes staggered to Bruno and repeated what he'd said, like mates mate, the captain's body jellied with glee and the hungover mate convulsing with high-pitched wheezes, the two of them punching and pawing each other until they collapsed in/to a lopsided embrace—a junction of dumb rapture that struck Adi as even more alien than whatever the dolphins were up to behind the boat. He glanced back to check on them. It seemed possible the dolphins were laughing too.

Only the sight of Santa Flora on the horizon quelled the hysterics. As soon as Adi alerted them to the distant gray bulge the sailors wiped their eyes and smoothed their shirts and comported themselves like naval officers again. As the island came into sharper view, less a gray bulge now than a beige spearhead, an abrupt and orderly calm seized the boat. Even for himself, Adi couldn't say whether this calm stemmed from wonder or fear or reverence or dread or merely from the visual cue of the day's mission, like a factory whistle summoning lunching workers back to their stations. The captain snapped orders and the mate executed them. Adi turned to see what the porpoises were doing but the porpoises were gone.

Excerpted from Eradication by Jonathan Miles. Copyright © 2026 by Jonathan Miles. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.